‘Clubhouse’ goes from home to home plate

Can America’s favorite pastime sustain a weekly TV series?

Baseball has tried before, in both comedy (“Ball Four”) and drama (“Bay City Blues”), but hopes are high as executive producers Mel Gibson and Aaron Spelling give the notion another shot. A family saga as well as the story of a ballclub, the sweetly old-fashioned CBS drama “Clubhouse” gets an advance premiere Sunday, two nights before settling into its regular Tuesday slot.

The team in question is the fictional New York Empires, whose pinstripes were magically (or, more precisely, digitally) removed from the pilot episode after New York Yankees executives reportedly found the uniforms’ look too close for comfort. The players include near-mythic third baseman Conrad Dean (Dean Cain), and they have a new batboy in Pete Young (Jeremy Sumpter, “Peter Pan”), an impressionable kid awed at his good fortune in getting the job.

Pete doesn’t want his highly protective single mother (Mare Winningham) interfering, so he keeps his job a secret as long as possible. That’s roughly two-thirds of the way through the first script, when police catch him driving an Empire player’s flashy car that Pete doesn’t know contains drugs.

Debating whether to take the fall or tell the truth, he’s counseled by the team’s rough-around-the-edges equipment manager (Christopher Lloyd).

Kirsten Storms, who recently left the role of Belle Brady on the NBC daytime serial “Days of Our Lives,” also stars as Pete’s wild-child sister.

Sumpter, 15, is happy to have landed the pivotal part of the team newcomer, especially knowing something about the sport himself.

“I’ve played baseball all my life,” he says. “I grew up in Kentucky, and I was actually on a team that went to the state championship and won. When I came out to L.A. to act, I had to give that up a bit. Just being out there, having a bunch of people watching you play a game, gives you a thrill. I’m on a men’s league softball team with my dad; we lose every game, but we always have fun playing.”

Participating in sports is also second nature to charismatic Cain, who couldn’t wait to get to a CBS press party at Dodger Stadium in July so that he could try to belt one out of the park. The ex-Princeton football player actually was on the Buffalo Bills’ roster for “an hour and a half,” he says jokingly. “I was carried on the team ‘til November, although I was on injury reserve starting at the end of July. Just before our first preseason game, I had surgery. I just sort of floated, and I never got healthy and had to retire.”

Still, the experience gave Cain a real sense of being part of a clubhouse. “There is that camaraderie, that sort of family-unit feel, and that’s really important for the chemistry and makeup of a team.”

The baseball sequences for “Clubhouse” are filmed partially on a set with a “virtual stadium” and sometimes on location at Blair Field in Long Beach.

Executive producer Ken Topolsky (“Party of Five,” “The Wonder Years”) says the series never will be “strictly a show about baseball, but we had to put enough in so that it had a sense of reality. We don’t have to have a full play run, just enough so it meets the dramatic needs of the script.”

As a mother of grown children, Winningham (returning to CBS after last season’s “The Brotherhood of Poland, New Hampshire”) knows how real her “Clubhouse” character’s domestic dilemmas are. “She has made a lot of sacrifices to make her life fit the most important thing -- her kids,” she says.

“This baseball team has all the qualities she would want for her son; a great, sort of innocent kid meets up with a hero. On the other side, she’s got her wayward teenage daughter, who takes up a lot of her energy. They’re two counterpoints for her to struggle between.”

Gibson’s Icon Productions is entering TV in a big way this season, also turning out UPN’s “Veronica Mars” and ABC’s “Complete Savages.”

Jay Bobbin writes for Tribune Media Services.

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‘Clubhouse’

When: Series premiere is 8 to 9 p.m. Sunday; regular schedule is 9 to 10 p.m. Tuesdays.

Where: CBS

Rating: The premiere is rated TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children). Tuesday’s first regular-season episode is rated TV-PG-D (may be unsuitable for young children, with an advisory for suggestive dialogue).